How to Choose the Right Host For Your Online Video - ReadWriteCloud

How to Choose the Right Host For Your Online Video - ReadWriteClouIf all you want is a bunch of people to see your latest video, go ahead and post it on YouTube. If you want a lot more people to see that video or you want to embed it in your Web site or use it to bring mega-traffic to your site, you need to look at other hosting services, not just YouTube. And if you use multiple video hosting sites, you'll want a super-fast, simple way to upload your video to multiple sites. No problem. We'll show you how to do that, too.

Robin Miller is an independent videographer and freelance writer who was former editor-in-chief at Geek.net (formerly SourceForge) for 10 years. He has written three computer books for Prentice Hall and can be reached at robin@roblimo.com.

YouTube is the king of Web video. Every video you make for public consumption should be on YouTube, and the text description attached to every one of your YouTube videos should contain your Web site's URL. All embedded YouTube videos have a YouTube logo, which means they're using your site to promote YouTube. It's only fair for you to do the same thing in reverse.

A little learning can help your videos go a long way

Before you start posting heavily on YouTube, you should do a little homework atYouTube.com/creators_corner to learn how to get the most out of the site. (All Creators' Corner info about making quality video applies to other video sites, too.)

Here's an article by marketing tipster Joe Shaw about embedding YouTube videos in your (or any) Web site. We could do a whole article (or series of articles) about video embedding, but for the moment we'll leave you with Joe's tutorial, and talk about other sites where you might want to host your videos.

Dailymotion is not as strong a traffic driver as YouTube, but it's more than worth your upload time. Video quality is high, and it's free. Type your site's URL into the video info space, including http://, and you have a link to your site, which is good SEO. YouTube acts the same way. Neither site allows hyperlinks, so just type in your URL and be happy.

Dailymotion also has a "white box" (unbranded), paid account option called Dailymotion Cloud that costs $0.125 per player hour, which is not a bad considering that it is a complete video solution, including many player and display options, and has no monthly or annual minimum.

Now and then I've experienced buffering delays (where a video doesn't play momentarily because it's loading too slowly) on Dailymotion, but I get them with YouTube, too. These are often regional problems, and depend on the  Web cache a particular video service is using, and how much of a load it is handling at the moment.

Paying for video hosting

Why buy a cow when the YouTube milk is free?...